Found this backlit beauty in Greenville, SC's Falls Park, a lovely city park right downtown, through which the Reedy River runs and where you will find the Reedy River Falls. While waiting for better lighting for the falls, I wandered the park admiring and photographing the flora around. To retain the backlighting, I declined using my on-camera flash (all I had at the time) to allow for a faster shutter speed, so I didn't want to small an aperture (lost more sharpness when I stopped down further, and ISO 400 is my comfortable limit for noise on my camera).
Don't know what type of lily this is -- no blooms, but it resembles large decorative lilies. Full leaf is ~ 16 in / 40 cm long.
Nikon D80, Nikkor 105mm, ISO 400, f/11, 1/13s, tripod
processing in LR, cloning & sharpening in PS
Looks a lot like the canna lily leaves we have here only ours tend to be more of a dark green - they have that same pattern of colors running through them, though.
Bruce, I love the bright but not overly saturated colors on this. I also like that you put it on a diagonal with the main stem running from/to opposite corners. I think you got the sharpness on the stem where you get the most detail so good choice there as well.
My one suggestion would be to take a look at the ULC - it almost looks like you have some vignetting going on there. It seems a little darker in that top corner and down the upper left side of the frame - you might be able to reduce that in pp.
Hey Bruce, great looking subject, fantasic colors and lines. I like the angle on the stem. Looks soft at the edges and dont understand your mention of losing sharpness when stoping down, you're only at f/11 and have lots more f/stops to work with and shouldn't be losing sharpness.
I like the colors and the curls at the bottom. I don't know how windy it was but I believe if the f/stop was more in the range of F/22 you would have had more sharpness in the upper left hand side of the picture.
Sorry to leave out the detail.... just enough leaf movement that stopping down gave too slow a shutterspeed in early evening, and didn't have the SB800 to get good fill flash. f/22 just wasn't cutting it.